In The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text, historian Danila Oder argues that the Gospel of Mark was first a staged play, produced by Flavia Domitilla, niece of the emperor Domitian. It was acted as an entertainment for a congregation of well-to-do Hellenized Judeans in Rome. The main character was their heavenly Jesus figure (similar to Philo's Logos, an intermediary to God the Father). In the play's conventional dramatic plot, an angel (Jesus) comes to earth on a mission to die and return to the heavens. To preserve the memory of the performance, an act of patronage, Mark rewrote his play as a narrative in the style of Judean Scripture in hopes that it would be preserved. He was right: his congregation kept the text until it went east to Luke and Matthew. Mark's narrative--much edited both in and out of Rome--is the text that has come down to us.

The book assumes that the reader is comfortable with Jesus mythicism.

The bulk of the book is a detailed, inductive analysis of the play behind our text of the Gospel of Mark, and how it was performed, from the point of view of a director or stage manager.

The book has extensive footnotes and endnotes, and a complete index. In an appendix, the author has tentatively reconstructed the action of Mark's performed play. (She proposes it ended with a highly theatrical ascension scene.)

The topic of where, when and why the first gospel was written, is of interest to Jesus mythicists, historians of Flavian Rome, people intrigued by other Roman provenance theories, and people interested in ancient theater, particularly Roman mime.

After publication, the author wrote a blog "www.thetwogospelsofmark.com" which expanded her inductive speculations about Mark's context and congregation, the occasion for which he wrote the play, and the fate of Mark's text in the second century. In particular, blog posts propose that the link between Mark's congregation and Flavia Domitilla was the Herodian princess Berenice. The blog is archived at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Four years after publication, The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text remains by far the most detailed and plausible mythicist explanation for the literary and religious features of the Gospel of Mark. The book is centered on the observation that the Gospel of Mark is a sophisticated literary creation that could only have been written by a professional writer who was familiar with the theater of his day, and who expected real-life rewards (money, fame, honor) commensurate with his skill. From there, Oder suggests a real-life context and a real-life reason for Mark to write the text, and a plausible scenario that explains why his congregation preserved his text but did not use it in their religious observances.  

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